AustLit

'This thesis investigates the research question: What is the role of speculative fiction in a climate changed world? The short story collection: Capitalocene Dreams: Dark Tales of Near Futures explores life on the fringes of disintegrating Australian enclaves during the dying days of neoliberal excess. The exegesis: The 21st Century Catastrophe: Hyper-capitalism and Severe Climate Change in Science Fiction, contrasts ecocatastrophe science fiction of the sixties and seventies with contemporary climate or Anthropocene fiction.'

Source: Curtin University.

'The book reveals the ways in which Perth news media reports on these events routinely criminalised the actions of Tent Embassy participants at the expense of reporting on key issues of Aboriginal sovereignty and the members’ peaceful affirmation of native title. In its exposure of how reporting practices both legitimised and encouraged a violent state response to the Nyoongar ‘protest camp’, Setting Up the Tent Embassy offers both analysis of the Perth news media’s treatment of the Nyoongar Tent Embassy participants as well as insights into media representation of Indigenous issues more generally.' (Source: Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy website)

'Baalaa Kaarl Killelbirriny: His Hearth and Home of the Sergeant Ant' explores the Cultural Landscapes of the Kellerberrin Noongar, Cliff Humphries. This thesis demonstrates how colonial cartography and its legacy of blank-spaces is privileged over Noongar place naming and the continuity of localised Noongar song and story traditions. The contribution of this study is in showing how Noongar space can be re-engaged and reinterpreted, revealing lands of nourishment and lands possessing a lingua franca beyond a colonial logic and straight lines.

Source: Author's abstract.

'Life Writing is one of the leading journals in the field of biography and autobiography. It has the unique and unusual policy of carrying both scholarly articles and critically informed personal narrative. The journal has three sections: Academic Articles, Reflections and Reviews. Reflections essays differ from academic articles in that we do not expect a high level of analysis and referencing. We do, however, expect that the reflexive "I" will filter the subject matter, and that on the continuum from discursive/analytical to creative, these essays will fall somewhere in the middle. In other words, we do not publish purely creative essays, ficto-criticism, or memoirs; we include essays which fall into the genre of autoethnography. 

'The journal aims to publish work from many disciplines as well as work that is interdisciplinary. Historically, life writing has been the preserve of literary studies. Now, however, many other perspectives use biography and autobiography as analytical tools, hence object biography, autoethnography, autofiction, and many other inter-generic codes are thriving.  Life Writing provides expert and sympathetic reviewing of such interdisciplinary work. ' (Source : Taylor and Francis )

This is the first major study of Chinese women in Australia and it examines issues of ethnicity, gender and identity. The author focuses on the post-1970s period when the end of the White Australia policy led to an influx of Chinese migrants.

The form I have chosen for this dissertation is fiction-of a certain kind- that incorporates historical detail, family history, and popular mythology of the Western Australian community. Through the details of family and social history, I aim to tell another version of settlement of Perth from the midnineteenth century to the present. This story belongs to my family, starting with great-grandparents who travelled from London to Australia in the 185Os: one as a convict, one a free settler; both were Jewish, and the convict was Polish.

The writing is textured with forgotten voices, is self-reflexive, and tackles the paradoxes involved in telling stories from within the family I belong to, one that resists telling its own stories because of shame and the lack of an authoritative, or socially given, voice. From family history to social history, my interest is in the material that sits on the margins: the unspoken and generally unwritten histories of people on the edges of this society. This material, which is not recorded or spoken, nonetheless "speaks" a shame that shapes the everdeveloping identity of a family and a community.

The work is informed by feminist ideas about voice and the hierarchy which licenses select people in our society to speak. Relying on the varied materials that sit between historical writing and personal memories, it follows evidence, both written and oral, recognising how malleable memory can be. One of my purposes is to explore ideas about memory, from the individual act of memory to its transmutation into collective memory-to recover, recuperate, and explore what is involved in forgetting and remembering, and do this through a layering of stories, of voices, of form (Author's abstract).

'This thesis makes a comparative study of cultural differences and similarities between Chinese and Western outlaw heroes. It examines this cultural phenomenon from eight angles: the outlaw hero as constructed by history, literature and folklore; outlaws constructed as archetypal heroes; social and cultural contexts; outlaw heroes and revolution; a comparative case study of outlaws in Northeast China and Australia; underground cultural products (the "lore" and 'law"); ballads and proverbs reflecting values of outlaw heroism; and the fate of outlaws and the outlaw hero.Historical and folkloric explanatory frameworks are applied to outlaw hero traditions. Archetypal outlaw heroes and their successors, praised or criticised, are all constructed through a long process which combines reality recreated and fiction made real. Characteristics of archetypal outlaw heroes are inherited by later outlaws in China and the West. Though there are common codes and values of outlaw heroes in China and the West, different attributes are manifested in their attitudes towards brotherhood, organisation and women, and also in bandit sources and bandit categories. Western outlaw heroes are seldom involved in revolution, but their Chinese counterparts are connected with the Taiping revolutionary movement, the republican revolution and the Communist revolution. Some Communists are no more than outlaw heroes in the eyes of the poor and bandits in the eyes of the Kuomintang However, the alliance between outlaw heroes and revolutionaries is a fragile one. Northeast China and Australia have some parallels in their outlaw hero traditions. Convicts and immigrants play an important part in frontier banditry. The environment of both provides fertile soil for banditry and immigration. Among modem outlaws in Northeast China are chivalrous bandits and bandits who heroically fight against foreign Invaders. Bandit culture is valuable heritage in China. Bandits' ceremonies, argot, internal regulations, worship and superstition, and routine and recreational activities are all important facets of Chinese outlaw culture. Outlaw heroes never bend their bodies under pressure; they rebel rather than wait for death; and they never rob the locals. This is all reflected in bandit ballads, proverbs and other lore discussed in the thesis. Death is what most outlaws have to face, and how to fade it is a significant element in the construction of the outlaw hero. The arguments of this thesis are based on folkloric, historic and literary sources, many of which are here translated into English for the first time.'

Source: Abstract.

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